White water rafting - Ohiopyle, PA

It's been a while since I had been white water rafting and Ramya has always wanted to do it. So, finally just before we are to move to Austin, Pratik put together a trip to Ohiopyle, PA for a bunch of folks to hit some rapids on the Lower Youghiogheny river.

So on the morning of June 14th, 15 of us drove 4 hours to reach Ohiopyle from the DC area. The whole group got ready to check in at 10:30am when we were told that our group's check in time was at noon. Some people were pissed because they had to get up very early in the morning to make it to Ohiopyle in time for the check in only to realize that they could have had some extra sleep on a Saturday morning. In any case, we drove into the small, quaint town down the road and enjoyed some coffee and saw a small waterfall. Just as we were beginning to sign our waiver forms, the skies opened up and started raining like crazy. We got done with the forms and were hoarded in the buses which were to take us to the starting point for our white water rafting adventure. All of us were completely drenched by now. We would have gotten wet on the river in any case so it was no big deal!

The 15 of us were split into 3 groups of 5 each. Me, Ramya, Tatya, Sarah and Pratik were in Group1. Anand, Akki, Mohini, Reema and Gina were Group 2. Esmail, Ashraf, Zubeida, Kapil and Farah were in Group 3. We reached our starting point and were assigned guides. The lead guide walked us through the safety procedures and showed us how to paddle upon our raft guide's instructions. I was the only one in our raft to have had any prior rafting experience. So, I was at the front of the raft. After getting done with the safety procedures, we dragged our raft onto the river and off we went white water rafting.

Our guide Dan was a college kid from WVU. We hit some Class 3 rapids and some beginner Class 4 rapids which were fun. After about an hour and a half on the river, everybody stopped for lunch. After lunch, we hit most of the popular rapids on the river. On one of the rapids, Ramya fell off the raft and into the river. She didn't drift too far away as she managed to hold on to a rope which ran all around the raft. Tatya and me immediately picked her back into the raft by pulling her life jacket. She was scared a bit was it was all fun for her. The highlight of the entire trip was the entire Mahajan clan in the DC area falling off the raft and into the river. But everyone was pulled back into the raft and everybody was OK.

Finally, after covering about 7 miles on the river in just about 4 hours, we reached the end point of our adventure. We got off the river, dragged the raft back to the trailer and got onto our bus. All in all it was a fun adventure trip and a whole group of people could claim to have lost their white water rafting virginity! Thanks to Pratik for putting together the trip.

Here are the pics from the trip taken of Group 1...